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Settler mush: Edith Snook, ‘”The Surest Plan”: Recipes, Joel Barlow’s “The Hasty-Pudding” (1796), and Settler Memory in the British Atlantic World’, Early American Literature, 61, 2, 2026, pp. 323-350

21Jul26

Abstract: This essay explores how recipes for hasty pudding circulating in the eighteenth-century British Atlantic world are part of the settler history of colonial extraction. Hasty pudding recipes informed not just Joel Barlow’s republican mock heroic poem “The Hasty-Pudding” (New York, 1796) but also the recipe culture of those who remained loyal to Britain. Recipes in the Almon Scrapbook (Almon Family Fonds, MG1 vol. 14, Nova Scotia Archives) belonging to the family of Nova Scotia physician Dr. William James Almon were copied from Essays, Political, Economical, and Philosophical(London and Dublin, 1796) by Sir Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford (1753–1814), a Massachusetts-born Loyalist. These recipes make corn, an Indigenous food, available for settler and colonial use and establish the domestic as a space of colonial power.


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